A Dinosaur That Sings, Dances, Eats Props and Expands on Cue. Built in Ten Weeks.

Commission: Mark Thompson Productions | The Dinosaur That Pooped a Rock Band

The Brief

Mark Thompson Productions commissioned Creature Encounters to design and build Dino for their touring musical The Dinosaur That Pooped a Rock Band — written and directed by Miranda Larson, based on the original IP by Tom Fletcher and Dougie Poynter.

The challenge was substantial. The suit needed to sing, dance and move with the energy of a full musical production. It needed to eat props — storing them internally and retrieving them on cue. It needed a stomach capable of visibly expanding and contracting. And it needed to do all of this without creasing, without losing the brand's aesthetic, and with a realistic skin texture that would hold up to close inspection from theatre audiences of all ages.

Oh, and it needed to be ready in ten weeks.

The Build

The central engineering challenge was the expanding belly — a mechanism that had to be seamless in performance, invisible to an audience, and robust enough to run eight shows a week on tour. Achieving this without the suit creasing under the mechanical stress required significant development work on the internal structure and the skin fabrication simultaneously.

The prop-eating function demanded equally careful engineering — a concealed internal storage system that could receive props cleanly during performance and hold them securely without affecting the suit's silhouette or the performer's movement.

Throughout the build, the creative team's brand aesthetic was the fixed point. Every mechanical decision was made in service of the character's appearance, not in spite of it. The final Dino was delivered on time, on budget, and exactly to brief.

The Specifications

The finished suit featured a multi-directional head, opening and closing mouth, blinking eyes, moving arms, the ability to eat and store props, and a fully functional expanding and contracting belly — all contained within a realistic skin texture that reads beautifully both on stage and at close quarters.

The Result

The initial tour of The Dinosaur That Pooped a Rock Band sold over 100,000 tickets.

A Note on Process

This was a challenging commission delivered under significant time pressure, with friction between the creative team and our workshop that prompted a valuable reflection on how we manage the creative leaps inherent in bespoke puppet-building projects. We came out of it with sharper processes for de-risking the development phase — for our clients as much as for ourselves.

We include this not in spite of the project's success, but because of it. Commissioners who have worked on complex character builds know that the path to an extraordinary result is rarely straightforward. We believe in being honest about our process, and we believe that the conversations those challenges produce make us better collaborators.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are a producer, director or creative director planning a bespoke puppet character for theatre, touring production, film or television, we would love to talk.

We work across the full spectrum of puppet and creature build — from full animatronic performer-supported rigs to mask prosthetics, hand puppets, marionettes and large-scale walkabout characters. Build time is always flexible and negotiable, dependent on available budget and project complexity.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters for theatre, television, live events and theme parks across the UK and internationally, for clients including Mark Thompson Productions, Away Resorts, Greater Anglia Trains, Blackgang Chine, Robin Hill Country Park, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

"I Think These Are Better Than the Original Characters."

Commission: Away Resorts | Bear, Brand Ambassador Character Suite | Ongoing Partnership Since 2020

The Relationship

Creature Encounters has been the puppet and character partner for Away Resorts since 2020 — designing, building, rebuilding, maintaining and developing their family of character assets across the estate. That family includes Bear, Lucy and Scratch: the three characters at the heart of Away Resorts' ambition to offer the world's leading holiday park character experience.

This is not a one-off commission. It is an ongoing creative partnership, built on trust, technical excellence and a shared commitment to the highest possible standard of character performance. It is the kind of relationship we are built for.

The Brief — Bear

Away Resorts' Creative Director Max Barraclough came to us with a clear and demanding brief: transform Bear — the company's beloved brand ambassador — into a world-class character experience. The existing suit was known and loved. The task was to make it extraordinary.

The focus was performability. Reduce weight. Increase the range and quality of movement. Improve the overall aesthetic. And do it in a way that preserved everything audiences already loved about Bear, while giving performers the tools to do something genuinely exceptional with him.

The Build

The solution was a lightweight, highly performable rigging system contained within a robust foam and fur skin — a structure that prioritises the performer's movement vocabulary above all else, because a character suit is only as good as what a performer can do inside it.

Once the initial Bear was signed off — tested and refined across the estate — we replicated a further two suits and supervised the full audition and training process for the puppeteers. Three Bears. One consistent, world-class character experience, deliverable simultaneously across the Away Resorts portfolio.

The specifications: multi-directional head, opening and closing mouth, blinking eyes, interchangeable arms, concealed viewing panels.

The Result

"I think these are better than the original characters."

-Max Barraclough, Creative Director, Away Resorts

Bear is, by our own assessment, the most successful character we have created to date. That assessment is shared by the client. The suit performs. The character lives. The audiences — children especially — believe completely.

The Ongoing Partnership

The Away Resorts relationship did not end with Bear. We have continued to build and maintain Lucy and Scratch, replicated multiple Muppet-style puppet characters for their pre-school programme, and developed Little Bear — five smaller versions of the character for younger audiences, with increased colour vibrancy and improved head range of motion.

Each project within this partnership has built on the last. Each one has made us better collaborators, better engineers and better makers. That cumulative depth of knowledge — of the brand, the performers, the estate, the audiences — is something that cannot be replicated in a single commission. It is the compounding dividend of a long-term creative relationship, and it is what we offer to clients who are thinking beyond the individual build.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are a creative director, brand manager or head of entertainment at a visitor attraction, theme park, holiday park or live events organisation, and you are thinking about your character experience — whether that means building from scratch, transforming what exists, or establishing an ongoing maintenance and development partnership — we would love to talk.

We work at every scale, from a single bespoke character to a full character family. Build time is always flexible and negotiable, dependent on project scope and available budget.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters for theatre, television, live events and visitor attractions across the UK and internationally, for clients including Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Greater Anglia Trains, Blackgang Chine, Robin Hill Country Park, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

We Built the Icon. It Went on to Star in National TV Campaigns. Here's How.

Commission: Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains | The Red Hare | Giant Animatronic Brand Puppet

The Brief

To celebrate the UK's largest-ever rail fleet revamp, Greater Anglia appointed Atomic London to create a new brand icon — a character that would embody the speed and grace of their new Pendolino trains while reflecting the natural history of the East Anglian landscape.

Atomic London made a polygon hare. Geometric, vivid, instantly recognisable — a brand device that has since appeared on national television, cinema, radio, out-of-home and digital platforms, and that Greater Anglia's own research shows makes 58% of people feel more positive about the brand.

Atomic London came to Creature Encounters to make it real.

The brief: translate the animator's 3D reference model into a 3 metre tall interactive puppet, recognisable as the brand icon, with a similar movement language to the digital character, and able to be posed when not in use. Built for audience engagement at live events.

The Engineering Challenge

Any large-scale puppet has three primary factors to consider: a strong aesthetic, credible movement, and performer concealment. On a character as geometrically distinctive as the Red Hare — where the visual identity is built on hard polygon forms rather than organic softness — performer concealment and aesthetic integrity were in fundamental tension.

We made a decision early: accept the performers' visibility. Free them from the constraint of concealment, and focus everything on the mechanics — on building a puppet that moves with the kinetic logic of a real hare, at 3 metres tall, in hard-wearing super-lightweight materials.

That decision was the right one. By replicating the skeletal structure of a hare in the internal rig — designed for full movement vocabulary, mechanical ear movement and cable-controlled sniff — the character developed a wonderful kinetic life that delivered instant brand recognition the moment it moved. The polygon aesthetic, clad over that animating structure, read exactly as the digital icon.

The brief was met. The character lived.

The Specifications

Three metre tall performer-supported rig. Full movement vocabulary. Mechanical ear movement. Cable-controlled sniff. Lightweight. Visible performers — a deliberate and liberating creative choice.

Build time: Seven weeks.

What Happened Next

The Red Hare went on to become one of the most consistently used and recognised brand characters in UK rail advertising. Since the original build, Atomic London has produced multiple national TV campaigns starring the character — including an Alice in Wonderland-inspired brand platform and a 2024 Christmas campaign that has run across TV, cinema, radio, digital and out-of-home. System One emotional response research has validated the character's impact, noting happiness trends and humour responses from audiences. Greater Anglia's own research shows 58% of people say the Hare makes them feel positive about the brand.

The puppet Creature Encounters built was the first physical realisation of that icon. The live event engagement work it was built for was the proof of concept that showed a brand character could work in three dimensions as powerfully as it did on screen.

"The client was very happy with the event and the finish of the character." - Reluca Anastasiu, Atomic London

A Note on the Process

Translating a precisely defined digital brand asset into a physical puppet is one of the most demanding briefs in character build — the aesthetic is fixed, the reference is exact, and there is no room for the interpretive latitude that a purely original commission allows. The challenge is fidelity without rigidity: building something that matches the icon precisely, while giving performers the mechanical tools to bring it to life.

The Red Hare is one of the clearest demonstrations of how Creature Encounters approaches that challenge — starting from the movement, building the skeleton, and letting the aesthetic follow the mechanics rather than fight them.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are a brand manager, creative director or experiential agency looking to realise a brand character as a physical puppet or animatronic figure for live events, product launches, brand activations or broadcast, we would love to talk.

We have extensive experience translating 2D and 3D brand assets into performance-ready physical characters — from large-scale walkabout rigs to intimate hand puppets. Every build starts with the same question: what does this character need to do, and how does it need to move?

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters for brand activation, theatre, television, live events and visitor attractions across the UK and internationally, for clients including Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Blackgang Chine, Robin Hill Country Park, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

Built by Former Henson's People. Replicated by Us. Improved in the Process.

Commission: Away Resorts | Scratch & Lucy | Muppet Style Puppet Replication & Development

The Brief

Away Resorts' beloved puppet characters Scratch and Lucy were originally created by former employees of the Jim Henson Creature Shop — the most celebrated puppet workshop in the world, responsible for the Muppets, the Sesame Street characters, and some of the most enduring puppet work in television history.

When Away Resorts needed multiple copies of Scratch and Lucy to serve their growing estate, they came to Creature Encounters. The brief was precise and demanding in equal measure: replicate the characters exactly — same aesthetics, same performer fit, same feel — but make multiple copies, and make them to the same standard as the originals.

The Challenge

Replicating another maker's work is a particular kind of challenge. The brief is not to interpret or improve — it is to understand, deeply and exactly, what the original maker did and why, and then to do it again. That requires a forensic deconstruction of the original character: the materials, the mechanisms, the proportions, the decisions made and those avoided.

With characters originally built by Henson's Creature Shop alumni, that deconstruction was a genuinely fascinating process — an opportunity to absorb a significant body of institutional knowledge, embedded in the physical construction of the puppets themselves. Every joint, every foam density, every mechanism told a story about how those makers thought about performance.

We listened carefully.

The Build

Working from the original characters as reference, we deconstructed their construction in order to replicate it — absorbing the institutional knowledge embedded in the originals while making our own refinements where appropriate. The most significant technical development was our first use of 3D design and printing to exactly replicate the characters' eyes — a precision tool that allowed us to match the originals at a level of accuracy that would have been extremely difficult to achieve through traditional fabrication alone.

The result was a set of Muppet-style puppet characters that matched the originals aesthetically, offered performers continuity of fit and feel, and incorporated refinements that — in the client's own words — made them better.

The Specifications

Characters matched to existing aesthetic. Performer continuity of fit. Multiple copies. 3D printed eyes for exact replication.

Build time: Three months.

The Result

"I think these are better than the original characters."

-Max Barraclough, Creative Director, Away Resorts

That is, in the context of characters originally built by former Henson's Creature Shop employees, a sentence worth sitting with for a moment.

A Note on Replication

Replication work is frequently underestimated as a brief. The absence of a design phase does not make it simpler — it makes it more demanding in different ways. There is no interpretive latitude. There is no room for a maker's instinct to substitute for fidelity to the original. The standard is set by someone else's best work, and the task is to meet it.

We have come to regard replication commissions as some of the most valuable work we do — not because they are commercially straightforward, but because they force a rigorous, analytical engagement with another maker's thinking that sharpens everything we do subsequently. The 3D printing capability we developed for Scratch and Lucy's eyes has since become part of our standard toolkit.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you have existing puppet or character assets that need replicating, restoring, rebuilding or maintaining — whether they were built by us or by someone else — we would love to talk.

We work with visitor attractions, holiday parks, theatre companies and live events organisations to manage and develop character asset portfolios over time. We understand that the characters your audiences already love are among your most valuable assets, and we treat them accordingly.

We also offer new builds in the Muppet style and soft puppet tradition — from single characters to full casts, for theatre, television, live events and broadcast.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters for theatre, television, live events and visitor attractions across the UK and internationally, for clients including Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Blackgang Chine, Robin Hill Country Park, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

Built for a Show. Used in a Hospice. Changed How Families Think About Conservation.

Commission: Animal Madness Ltd | Hyper-Realistic Orangutan Creature Suit | Conservation & Education

The Brief

Animal Madness creates live performance experiences designed to connect children to the wonders of the natural world — without harming animals in the process. Their shows place living, breathing, apparently real creatures in front of young audiences, creating encounters that no classroom, no screen and no zoo visit can replicate.

They wanted to add to their animatronic menagerie a realistic ape suit — an orangutan, capable of withstanding the close physical inspection of children during interactive show segments, and convincing enough to carry the emotional weight of the conservation message at the show's heart.

They came to Creature Encounters.

The Build

The challenge with a hyper-realistic creature suit is that realism operates at every scale simultaneously. A child at two metres is registering the overall silhouette and movement. A child at half a metre is registering the texture of the skin, the quality of the fur, the mechanics of the face. A child with their hand outstretched is registering all of it at once — and they are the harshest critics in the world, because they have not yet learned to suspend disbelief politely.

The solution was a sculpted and cast latex head, hands and feet — developed from clay sculpture through plaster mould to latex reproduction, then finished with fur laid over the rubber forms and exquisitely graded to create the colour variation and texture depth of a real orangutan's coat. A manipulated foam waddle and chest piece completed the body, with bespoke elements blended together using twelve-inch speciality fur to create seamless transitions between components.

The result was a multi-directional, hyper-realistic roaming character — one that moves like an ape, looks like an ape, and survives the scrutiny of the most determined and curious five-year-old in the room.

The Specifications

Roaming character. Multi-directional head. Sculpted and cast latex skin. Hyper-realistic fur finish. Built to withstand close physical inspection in live performance.

Build time: Four weeks.

The Result

"I am pleased to say that it has been everything I wanted it to be and more. We use it in a very powerful section of the show highlighting the work of a charity we work with, The Orangutan Project. It has created a huge response from families to help with sponsorship and conservation in general and I don't believe this section of the show would have half the response and impact it does without the amazing work you put in with the costume. It has visited a children's hospice and put smiles on faces and overall I couldn't be happier."

- Craig Crowton, Animal Madness Ltd

That testimonial deserves to be read slowly. A puppet — built in four weeks, in Birmingham — has been used to move families to act on conservation. It has visited a children's hospice and put smiles on faces. The work that a well-made creature can do in the world, in the right hands, is genuinely extraordinary. This is why we do what we do.

A Note on Craft

Hyper-realistic creature suits occupy a particular and demanding niche in puppet and costume fabrication. The standard is not "convincing at a distance" — it is "convincing up close, under scrutiny, in motion, by children." That standard requires a combination of sculptural skill, materials knowledge, soft engineering and a deep understanding of how performers move and how audiences perceive.

The Animal Madness orangutan is one of the clearest demonstrations in our portfolio of what that combination produces at its best. The four-week build time is not a claim about how easy it was — it is a demonstration of how efficiently a highly skilled, experienced team can move when the brief is clear and the craft is deep.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are creating educational, conservation or theatrical content that requires a realistic animal or creature character — for live performance, school touring, visitor attraction, broadcast or film — we would love to talk.

We have extensive experience building creature suits for educational and conservation contexts, where the emotional and narrative demands on the character are as important as the technical ones. We understand that a puppet in this context is not just a costume — it is a storytelling instrument, and we build it accordingly.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters for conservation, education, theatre, television, live events and visitor attractions across the UK and internationally, for clients including Animal Madness Ltd, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Blackgang Chine, Robin Hill Country Park, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

Two Polar Bears. Six Weeks. Audiences Were Emotional.

Commission: Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park | POLAR Christmas Spectacular | Animatronic Mother & Cub Polar Bear Costumes

The Brief

Robin Hill Country Park — one of the UK's best-loved family visitor attractions, on the Isle of Wight — was building a Christmas spectacular called POLAR. At its centre, they wanted an iconic, merchandisable character: something genuinely extraordinary that would define the event, carry its emotional weight, and become the image audiences took home with them.

They knew they wanted polar bears. They came to Creature Encounters to make them real.

The brief: two fully mobile, realistic polar bears — a mother and her cub — walk-around animatronic costumes capable of guest interaction throughout the event. Built to the highest possible standard. Built in six weeks.

The Build

The engineering challenge with large-scale walk-around animatronic costumes is the tension between scale and mobility. A polar bear needs to be big enough to produce that sharp intake of breath on first sight — genuinely imposing, genuinely animal. But a performer inside it needs to move freely enough to interact with guests, respond spontaneously, and sustain that interaction across a full event day without exhaustion or mechanical failure.

The solution was rapid patterning techniques to create the characters in lightweight, durable foams — a process that allows us to develop and refine the form quickly without committing to heavy materials that would compromise performance. Working into those foam forms, we then developed the mechanical structure to animate these enormous creatures: moving mouths, closing eyes, moving ears and a sniffing mechanism, all contained within a skin that reads as entirely, genuinely real.

The cub presented its own distinct challenge — a smaller, younger character with a different movement vocabulary, a different emotional register, and a different relationship to the audience. Where the mother commands space, the cub invites approach. Both needed to be true simultaneously.

The Specifications

Walk-around costumes. Moving mouths. Closing eyes. Moving ears. Sniffing mechanism. Lightweight, durable foam construction. Two characters — mother and cub — with distinct scales and movement vocabularies.

Build time: Six weeks.

The Result

"The polar bears were a divine focal point to our event, POLAR. Our customers were absolutely enchanted by these beautiful creatures and were quite emotional as a result. They brought a completely charming aspect to our picturesque park and the narrative will continue to develop for future POLAR events. Thank you once again, Creature Encounters.

- Verity Godwin, Vectis Ventures

The word that matters most in that testimonial is emotional. Robin Hill's guests — families, children, adults — were moved by an encounter with animatronic polar bears at a Christmas event in the Isle of Wight. Not just delighted. Emotional.

That is what a perfectly made creature can do. That is what we build for.

A Long-Term Relationship

The Robin Hill commission did not end with POLAR. Creature Encounter has delivered multiple builds for Vectis Ventures across their portfolio of attractions — including Cedric the Dragon and the Dodos at Blackgang Chine, and the Squirrel Bears at Robin Hill. Each project has deepened the relationship, the trust and the shared understanding of what world-class character experience means to this client and their audiences.

That continuity matters. A maker who knows your estate, your audiences, your operational requirements and your creative ambitions is a fundamentally different partner from one who is starting from scratch. We bring that depth to every Vectis Ventures commission, and we are proud of what it produces.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are planning a seasonal event, a visitor attraction experience or a character-led live entertainment programme that requires animatronic walk-around costumes — whether for a single event or an ongoing programme — we would love to talk.

We have extensive experience building characters for visitor attractions that need to perform repeatedly, reliably and at the highest quality standard, day after day, season after season. We understand the operational demands of the visitor attraction environment, and we build with those demands in mind from the first design decision.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters for visitor attractions, seasonal events, theatre, television and live events across the UK and internationally, for clients including Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

From Birmingham to Seoul. Expressive Animal Characters, Built to Disappear Into.

Commission: GyoungJae Lee, Seoul, South Korea | Fox & Rabbit | Bespoke Animal Mask Costumes with Expressive Latex Masks

The Brief

A client in Seoul, South Korea, came to Creature Encounters for a pair of bespoke animal character suits — a fox and a rabbit — with expressive masks and custom costuming built around them. The characters needed to read as genuinely animal: not pantomime, not cartoon, but creatures that an audience could believe in.

The brief was clean. The standard was high. The distance between client and workshop was approximately 9,000 kilometres.

The Craft

The masks are where these characters live or die, and the masks were built from scratch — sculpted in clay, cast in plaster, and reproduced in latex: the same process used in professional creature effects for film and television, applied here to characters built for live performance.

Once cast, fur was laid over the rubber forms and exquisitely graded — a process that requires both technical precision and a sculptor's eye, building colour variation and texture depth across the mask's surface until the blend between rubber and fur reads as a single, continuous, living material. The result is a mask that does not sit on top of a character — it becomes the character's face.

The critical challenge in any masked character is the transition between mask and performer: the point where the creature's face meets the actor's body. A poorly managed blend breaks the illusion immediately and irrecoverably. In the Fox and Rabbit suits, that blend was carefully, deliberately softened — the boundary between actor and mask blurred to the point where the audience registers a creature, not a costume.

The fox received a bespoke tail, built and weighted to move with the performer's body rather than against it. The costuming for both characters was developed in close collaboration with the client to serve their specific creative vision.

The Specifications

Bespoke costuming. Expressive sculpted latex masks. Fur graded over rubber forms. Tail for fox. Seamless actor-to-mask transition.

Build time: Five weeks.

A Note on International Commissions

The Fox and Rabbit commission is one of a number of international builds Creature Encounter has delivered — alongside characters shipped to Kuwait, Indonesia, Estonia, Singapore, Monaco, Russia and South Korea. Geography is not a constraint. Our characters are built to travel, packed to survive, and documented so that clients anywhere in the world can maintain them independently between uses.

We work comfortably with international clients across time zones, managing the design development process remotely and shipping finished characters to wherever they need to be. If you are outside the UK and looking for a puppet or creature character builder, we would be very glad to hear from you.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you need bespoke animal or creature characters — masks, suits, or the combination of both — for theatre, live performance, television, film or events, we would love to talk.

We work across the full spectrum of animal and creature character fabrication, from hyper-realistic creature suits built to withstand close inspection to expressive theatrical masks designed to carry emotion across a large space. Every build starts with the same question: what does this character need to do, and what does the audience need to believe?

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters and creature costumes for clients across the UK and internationally, including Seoul, Kuwait, Indonesia, Estonia, Singapore, Monaco and Russia, for clients including Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

A New Species. Peacock Feathers. Three Weeks. This Is What Crowdfunding Built.

Commission: Lakeside Arts, University of Nottingham | Dinosaurs of China Exhibition | Feathered Walk-Around Dinosaur Puppet

The Brief

Lakeside Arts — the arts and cultural centre at the University of Nottingham — was hosting Dinosaurs of China: an exhibition documenting new species discoveries that have fundamentally changed our understanding of dinosaur evolution, and in particular the relationship between dinosaurs and modern birds.

Their education department wanted to bring those discoveries to life. Not on a screen, not in a display case, but in the room — a walk-around puppet character based on one of the newly documented species, built for direct visitor interaction and capable of making the science tangible, immediate and unforgettable.

They launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund the build. They came to Creature Encounters to deliver it.

The Design

The design brief was rooted in science. The Dinosaurs of China exhibition documented species whose fossilised remains revealed, for the first time, clear evidence of feathers — closing the evolutionary gap between dinosaurs and birds and reshaping palaeontology. The character needed to reflect those discoveries: not the scaly, reptilian dinosaur of twentieth-century imagination, but the feathered, bird-like creature that the fossil record actually describes.

The solution was peacock feathers — trimmed and punched directly into a foam rubber skin to create the creature's mane and tail. The result is a character that carries the scientific accuracy of the exhibition into every visitor interaction: a living demonstration, in the room, of what the fossils in the cases are actually telling us.

It is, in the most literal sense, a piece of scientific communication built from foam and feathers. It is also, by any measure, extraordinarily beautiful.

The Build

The foam rubber skin was developed to receive the punched feathers cleanly and hold them securely across the demands of repeated daily visitor interaction. The mechanical structure gave the character a moving mouth, a moving brow and a false arm illusion — the combination of mechanisms that allows a performer to create the impression of a complete, living creature from a partial rig.

The false arm illusion deserves a note: it is one of the most elegant solutions in walkabout puppet performance, allowing a single performer to suggest a fully embodied creature without the weight and restriction of a full suit. In a character whose aesthetic is built on lightness and movement — on the bird-like qualities of the feathered dinosaurs — it was exactly the right choice.

The Specifications

Moving mouth. Moving brow. False arm illusion. Peacock feather mane and tail, punched into foam rubber skin. Walk-around visitor interaction character.

Build time: Three weeks.

A Note on Crowdfunded Commissions

The Dinosaurs of China puppet was funded by a public crowdfunding campaign — a model of commissioning that is increasingly used by arts and cultural organisations to fund character builds that sit outside their core budget. We are experienced in working with this funding model and understand the particular constraints and timelines it creates.

If you are an arts organisation, museum, gallery or educational institution with a character build in mind and a funding challenge to solve, we would be very glad to discuss the options — including phased builds, scaled specifications and alternative funding approaches.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are planning an exhibition, educational programme or visitor experience that would benefit from a live character encounter — whether a single walk-around puppet or a full suite of interactive creatures — we would love to talk.

We have extensive experience building characters for arts, educational and cultural contexts, where the brief is not just entertainment but meaning — where the character exists to make an idea tangible, a discovery real, or a story worth remembering. We understand that kind of brief, and we build for it.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters for arts organisations, museums, educational institutions, visitor attractions, theatre and live events across the UK and internationally, for clients including Lakeside Arts / University of Nottingham, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

The UK's Oldest Theme Park Wanted a Dragon. We Built Them One They'll Never Forget.

Commission: Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine | Cedric the Dragon | Giant Animatronic Walk-Around Dragon Costume

The Brief

Blackgang Chine — the oldest theme park in the United Kingdom, perched on the cliffs of the Isle of Wight since 1843 — wanted a new ambassador character. Not a seasonal addition. Not a supporting act. A star: a character capable of headlining their shows, anchoring guest interactions across the park, and becoming the face of Blackgang Chine for a generation of visitors.

They wanted a dragon.

They came to Creature Encounters — continuing the creative partnership with Vectis Ventures that had already produced the POLAR bears at Robin Hill Country Park, and would later produce the Dodos. The brief was ambitious: a walk-around costume of genuine scale, with a moving head, an opening mouth, a moving brow, an onboard smoke system and an onboard sound system. A character that could perform in shows and roam the park with equal conviction.

Built in seven weeks.

The Engineering Challenge

Cedric is the largest solo performer-supported rig Creature Encounter has created to date. At that scale, the relationship between size and weight becomes the central engineering problem — because every kilogram added to the rig is a kilogram the performer carries across a full working day, across multiple shows, across an entire season.

The solution was inflatable elements — used to push the scale of the character to its limits while keeping the overall weight within the range a performer can sustain safely and comfortably. Inflatables allow volume without mass: the visual impression of a creature of genuine size, without the structural weight that solid construction at that scale would demand.

The result is a dragon who fills a space the way a dragon should — imposing, surprising, genuinely large — while remaining, inside, a rig that a performer can inhabit for the duration of a working day without injury or exhaustion. That balance is not an accident. It is the result of considered engineering at every stage of the build.

The Skin

The smoke system and the sound system are the features that most immediately impress an audience. But the detail that stays with them — the thing that makes Cedric genuinely, lastingly memorable rather than simply spectacular — is the skin.

We are, in our own assessment, very fond of Cedric's skin. Its texture is tactile and inviting — the kind of surface that makes both children and adults want to reach out and touch it. Its colour palette is distinct: vivid enough to command attention across a crowded park, nuanced enough to reward close inspection. It is the work of makers who understand that a character's surface is not decoration — it is the first and last thing an audience registers, and it carries more of the emotional weight of the encounter than any mechanical feature.

A dragon with a smoke system is impressive. A dragon with a smoke system and a skin worth touching is unforgettable.

The Specifications

Walk-around costume. Multi-directional head. Opening mouth. Moving brow. Onboard smoke system. Onboard sound system. Inflatable structural elements for scale-to-weight optimisation. Textured, tactile skin with distinct colour palette.

Build time: Seven weeks.

The Result

"Thank you so so much for the fabulous Cedric! We are over the moon to have him."

- Verity Godwin, Blackgang Chine

Verity Godwin has commissioned Creature Encounters across multiple projects at multiple Vectis Ventures attractions. Her response to Cedric — "over the moon" — sits within a relationship built on consistently delivered, consistently extraordinary work. We do not take that lightly.

The Vectis Ventures Partnership

Cedric is one of several characters Creature Encounters has built for Vectis Ventures across their portfolio of Isle of Wight attractions — alongside the POLAR bears and Squirrel Bears at Robin Hill Country Park, and the Dodos and prehistoric dinosaur characters at Blackgang Chine. Each commission has deepened the relationship, the trust and the shared understanding of what world-class character experience means for these parks and their audiences.

For a visitor attraction group managing multiple sites, a trusted long-term character partner is an operational asset as well as a creative one — a maker who knows the estate, the performers, the audiences and the maintenance requirements, and who can be called on to build, rebuild, repair and develop without briefing from scratch every time. That is what this partnership is. That is what we offer.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are planning a flagship character for a theme park, visitor attraction, heritage site or live entertainment venue — a character built to headline, to anchor, to become the face of your experience for years to come — we would love to talk.

We understand the specific demands of the visitor attraction environment: the need for durability across a full season, the need for performer comfort across a full working day, the need for a character that commands a space and rewards the investment of an audience's belief. We build with all of those demands in mind from the first design decision.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters and animatronic creatures for visitor attractions, theme parks, theatre and live events across the UK and internationally, for clients including Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

A Dark Myth. A Sculptor's Vision. A Mask Built in Five Days.

Commission: Big Brum Theatre in Education | The Minotaur | Theatrical Mask — Sculpted, Moulded, Cast

The Brief

Big Brum Theatre in Education is one of the UK's most respected Theatre in Education companies — a Birmingham-based organisation with a forty-year history of making work that takes young audiences seriously, that engages with difficult ideas without flinching, and that trusts children to inhabit complex emotional territory.

Chris Cooper's production of the Minotaur was a dark reworking of the original Greek mythology — not the pantomime monster of popular imagination, but the tragic, ambiguous creature of the original myth: half human, half beast, imprisoned for what he is rather than what he has done. A character of genuine pathos, and genuine terror.

The production's creative reference point was the work of sculptor Beth Carter — whose bronze figures of hybrid human-animal creatures carry a rich patina of oxidising iron ore, a surface quality of age and weight and sorrow. That surface was the brief: replicate it, in a mask, on a face, in five days.

The Craft

The mask was built through the full sculptural fabrication process — sculpted in clay, cast in plaster, reproduced in the final material — a process that normally takes significantly longer than five days and was compressed here through experience, efficiency and a clear understanding of exactly what the brief required.

The central challenge was the surface finish. Beth Carter's sculptural work derives its power from the texture and colour of oxidising metal — a surface that suggests age, weight and transformation, that reads simultaneously as organic and industrial, as living and ancient. Replicating that quality in a theatrical mask required careful material selection and finishing work: the final metallic finish disguises an incredibly lightweight and comfortable mask — one that an actor can apply independently, wear throughout a performance without discomfort, and trust to read correctly under stage lighting at every distance from the front row to the back of the house.

The result is a mask that does what the best theatrical masks always do — it does not cover the actor's face, it transforms it. The Minotaur is not wearing a mask. He is wearing his face.

The Specifications

Sculpted in clay. Cast in plaster. Reproduced in final material. Metallic finish replicating the aesthetic of oxidising iron ore. Lightweight and comfortable for independent actor application. Built for repeated theatrical performance.

Build time: Five days.

A Note on Theatre in Education

Big Brum is one of a number of theatre companies Creature Encounters has worked with whose practice places particular demands on the characters and masks we build — demands that go beyond the technical and into the ethical. Theatre in Education work that engages with difficult mythology, with grief, with violence, with the complexity of being human, requires characters that carry genuine weight. A mask that reads as costume breaks the work. A mask that reads as face serves it.

We understand that distinction. We build for it. And we are proud to have contributed to work as serious and as important as Big Brum's.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are a theatre company, director or designer looking for a mask or prosthetic character for a production — whether a single piece built to a specific artistic reference, or a suite of characters for a larger work — we would love to talk.

We work across the full spectrum of theatrical mask fabrication, from simple, fast-turnaround pieces built to a tight production schedule to complex, multi-layer prosthetic builds designed to last a long run. Every mask starts with the same question: what does this character need the audience to feel?

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke masks, puppets and animatronic characters for theatre companies, visitor attractions, live events and broadcast across the UK and internationally, for clients including Big Brum Theatre in Education, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Animal Madness Ltd, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

Beloved Icons. Extinct Birds. Brought Back to Life in Six Weeks.

Commission: Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine | The Dodos | Animatronic Walk-Around Puppet Costumes

The Brief

Blackgang Chine — the oldest theme park in the United Kingdom, and one of the Isle of Wight's most beloved family destinations — has its own mythology. Across its themed zones, it has built a world of characters and creatures that generations of visitors have grown up with. The Dodos are among the most cherished of those characters: icons of the park, as much a part of Blackgang Chine's identity as the cliffs and the coastline.

Vectis Ventures entrusted Creature Encounters with the task of realising those beloved characters as interactive walk-around puppet costumes. The brief had an additional layer of complexity beyond the standard character build: because the Dodos roam between the park's multiple themed zones — Cowboy Town, the Pirate Galleon, the Fairy Fling — each costume needed to incorporate elements that would allow the characters to blend credibly into each distinct environment, moving between worlds without breaking either.

Three characters. Six weeks. A brief that required the Dodos to be simultaneously themselves and contextually adaptable.

The Engineering

The central engineering challenge was scale and counterbalance. The Dodo is a compact bird — smaller in stature than many walk-around characters — which meant the performer's upper body needed to be concealed within the bird's travelling pack rather than the main body of the costume. This created an immediate structural problem: a costume weighted heavily at the front, which would naturally pull the performer forward and compromise both the illusion and the performer's safety.

The solution was deliberate: the weight of the puppeteer's rig at the front of the costume required the performer to lean slightly back as a counterbalance — a constraint that, rather than breaking the illusion, actively reinforced it. A Dodo leaning slightly back, moving with the careful, considered gait that the counterbalance demands, moves exactly as a Dodo ought to move: with the unhurried, slightly pompous dignity of a bird that has never had a reason to hurry and sees no reason to start now.

A constraint became a characteristic. The engineering became the performance.

The Craft

Each Dodo features a multi-directional head, a moving mouth, an eyeblink mechanism and a walk-around construction built for the demands of a full working day across a busy theme park. The travelling packs that conceal the performers' upper torsos are not just structural solutions — they are character elements, carrying the visual story of birds who have been somewhere, who are in the middle of a journey, who have things with them.

The multi-zone costuming — the elements that allow the Dodos to move between Cowboy Town, the Pirate Galleon and the Fairy Fling without incongruity — required careful design work, building costume components that serve multiple aesthetic contexts without fully belonging to any single one. The Dodos are, in this sense, citizens of the whole park rather than residents of any single zone. Which is, when you think about it, exactly right for a bird that wandered.

The Specifications

Walk-around costumes. Multi-directional heads. Moving mouths. Eyeblink mechanisms. Travelling pack performer concealment. Multi-zone costume elements for cross-park roaming. Three characters.

Build time: Six weeks.

The Result

"A massive, MASSIVE thank you from us all here. The Dodos excelled expectation and will be a fabulous addition to our offering here at Blackgang Chine."

- Verity Godwin, Vectis Ventures

The capitalisation is Verity's own. We have left it exactly as she wrote it.

The Vectis Ventures Partnership

The Dodos are the third Creature Encounters commission for Vectis Ventures — following the POLAR bears at Robin Hill Country Park and Cedric the Dragon at Blackgang Chine, and preceding the prehistoric dinosaur characters for Blackgang Chine's Restricted Area 5. Each commission has built on the last: the trust deeper, the brief richer, the shared understanding of what these parks need from their characters more precise.

For a visitor attraction group with multiple sites, multiple character families and multiple audiences to serve, that depth of ongoing relationship is not a luxury — it is an operational necessity. A maker who knows your estate does not just build better characters. They ask better questions, anticipate problems before they emerge, and deliver work that fits into a living, breathing creative world rather than arriving from outside it.

That is what this partnership is. That is what we offer.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are a theme park, visitor attraction or heritage site looking to bring beloved existing characters to life as interactive walk-around puppet costumes — or to create new characters that will become icons in their own right — we would love to talk.

We understand the specific demands of multi-zone park environments: the need for characters that can travel between themed worlds, serve multiple audience contexts and withstand the rigours of a full season's daily use. We build with all of those demands in mind from the first design decision.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters and animatronic creatures for visitor attractions, theme parks, theatre and live events across the UK and internationally, for clients including Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

Two Giants. Seven Weeks in Kuwait. Built From Bedouin Mythology and Smoke.

Commission: Aldour Events / Remal International Festival, Kuwait | Nomadica — The Jin | Giant Animatronic Characters Celebrating A Thousand and One Nights

The Brief

The Remal International Festival is one of Kuwait's most significant cultural celebrations — a major public event drawing broad international audiences, held in the heart of one of the Arabian Gulf's most culturally rich nations. The 2019 festival was built around A Thousand and One Nights: the ancient collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales that gave the world Scheherazade, Sinbad, Ali Baba, and the architecture of the frame narrative itself.

Aldour Events needed world-class entertainment solutions worthy of that material, for a broad international demographic, at scale. They came to Creature Encounters.

The brief was unlike anything we had received before: create characters that functioned as the festival's living mythology — not performers in costume, but presences. Slow, silent, ancient. Moving statues, in the tradition of the host culture, but animated from within, breathing mist, carrying the spirit of the Arabian Nights into every corner of the festival site.

The Concept

The design response was Nomadica — a pair of Jin characters drawing on the Bedouin roots of Kuwaiti culture, infused with the magical and animistic elements at the heart of the Arabian Nights tradition.

The Jin of Islamic and pre-Islamic mythology are not monsters. They are beings of smokeless fire — ancient, sovereign, capable of great good and great harm, present in the world in ways that humans cannot fully perceive or predict. They move differently from humans. They occupy space differently. They do not hurry. They do not explain themselves.

The Nomadica characters were built on exactly that understanding. Slow giants. Silent giants. Giants whose internal smoke systems allowed an eerie mist to escape from their heads — a visual manifestation of what the Jin are, in the mythology: creatures of smoke and fire, present and ancient and entirely beyond the ordinary scale of the world.

Three times daily. For seven weeks. Without malfunction.

The Build

Characters of this scale and complexity — each with a multi-directional head, moving mouth, onboard sound system with microphone, and internal smoke mechanism — required a build process that balanced aesthetic ambition with operational reliability. These characters were not going to be performing for a weekend and then retiring to a workshop. They were going to Kuwait, where they would perform three times daily for seven weeks in conditions that would test every joint, every mechanism, every material choice.

The engineering brief was therefore twofold: create characters of genuine visual power and mythological weight, and create characters that would not fail. Both were met.

The smoke systems — internal mechanisms that produced a continuous, controllable mist escaping from the heads — required particular engineering attention. A smoke system that fails mid-performance, or that behaves unpredictably in heat and humidity, is not a smoke system. The Nomadica smoke systems were built to perform in the Gulf climate, reliably, repeatedly, across the full seven-week run.

The Specifications

Two roaming characters. Multi-directional heads. Moving mouths. Onboard sound systems with microphones. Internal smoke systems producing mist from the head. Built for daily performance in Gulf climate conditions over seven weeks.

Build time: Seven weeks.

The Deployment

The Creature Encounters team flew to Kuwait with the characters and their performers, delivered the full seven-week performance residency, and returned home having performed hundreds of shows without a single mechanical failure. The characters performed three times daily to a broad international audience celebrating one of the world's great storytelling traditions, in the country whose culture and mythology informed that tradition most directly.

There are very few entertainment companies in the UK — or anywhere — capable of designing, building, shipping, performing and maintaining characters of this complexity on an international residency of this length. Creature Encounter is one of them.

The Result

"Creature Encounter sdesigned and built our characters to the highest standards, flew them across the world with a team of performers and delivered exceptional performances for seven weeks. I cannot recommend them enough."

- Yousef Aldour, Aldour Events

A Note on International Commissions

The Remal Festival commission is the clearest demonstration in our portfolio of what full-service international deployment looks like — from design concept through fabrication, international shipping, performance residency and return. We have delivered international commissions to Kuwait, Indonesia, Estonia, Singapore, Monaco, Russia and South Korea, and we are experienced in managing every logistical, cultural and operational dimension of working abroad.

If you are planning an event, festival or cultural programme outside the UK and looking for a character entertainment company capable of delivering at the highest international standard — from first design conversation to final performance — we would be very glad to hear from you.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are planning a large-scale cultural event, international festival or immersive entertainment experience that requires bespoke animatronic characters of genuine scale and complexity — whether in the UK or internationally — we would love to talk.

We work at the intersection of cultural depth and technical excellence: characters rooted in real mythology, real craft traditions and real artistic ambition, built to perform reliably in real-world conditions across extended runs. That combination is rarer than it sounds, and it is what Nomadica was built on.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke animatronic characters and full-service performance residencies across the UK and internationally, for clients including Aldour Events / Remal International Festival Kuwait, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, and Lakeside Arts Nottingham.

Five Little Bears. A Pre-School Audience. Higher Colour. Better Movement. Two Months.

Commission: Away Resorts | Little Bear | Pre-School Puppet Character Replication & Development

The Brief

Away Resorts' pre-school programme needed its own characters — smaller, brighter, more accessible versions of the beloved Bear family that Away Resorts audiences had already grown to love. Lucy's Little Bears were pre-existing character assets, originally developed by a previous puppet builder, that had served the programme well but that Away Resorts wanted to refresh, replicate and improve.

Creative Director Max Barraclough came to Creature Encounters — continuing the long-term character partnership that had already produced the full-scale Bear suits, the Scratch and Lucy Muppet-style puppets, and the ongoing maintenance and development of Away Resorts' entire character portfolio.

The brief: replicate the Little Bears in multiple copies, with material improvements — a more vibrant colour palette and an increased range of head motion — that would make them more visually engaging for very young audiences and more performable for the puppeteers working with them.

Five copies. Two months.

The Build

Replicating and improving a pre-existing character simultaneously is a particular kind of brief — one that requires the discipline of fidelity and the confidence of development at the same time. Too conservative and the improvements are cosmetic. Too radical and the character loses continuity with what audiences already know and love.

The balance we struck was precise. The colour palette was enhanced — richer, more saturated, more immediately legible to a pre-school audience whose visual world is built on strong, clear colour signals. The head range of motion was increased — a mechanical improvement that gives performers more expressive vocabulary and gives young audiences more to respond to, more movement to track, more life to believe in.

Everything else was held. The character that Away Resorts' youngest guests already knew was preserved in all its essentials, while the tools available to the performers who bring it to life were meaningfully improved.

A Note on Pre-School Audiences

Pre-school audiences are the most demanding audience in live performance. Not because they are critical — they are the opposite of critical, open and generous in ways that older audiences have learned to suppress — but because they are entirely honest. A character that does not hold a very young child's attention does not hold it. There is no polite pretending, no willing suspension of disbelief. Either the character is alive, or it isn't.

Building for pre-school audiences therefore requires a specific understanding of how very young children process visual information — the role of colour saturation, the importance of movement range, the particular quality of eye contact that a puppet can offer and that a very young child will respond to with complete, unguarded trust. The Little Bears were built with all of that understanding in place.

A vivid colour palette is not a stylistic choice for a pre-school character. It is a functional requirement. An increased head range of motion is not a technical nicety. It is the difference between a puppet that a two-year-old looks at and one that a two-year-old looks into.

The Specifications

Five copies. Rod-controlled arm. Multi-directional head with increased range of motion. Enhanced colour palette for pre-school audience engagement.

Build time: Two months.

The Away Resorts Partnership

The Little Bears commission is the fourth Creature Encounters project for Away Resorts — following the full-scale Bear suits, the Scratch and Lucy Muppet-style puppets, and ongoing maintenance across the estate. Each project has built on the last: the understanding deeper, the brief more precise, the results more consistently excellent.

Away Resorts' ambition — to offer the world's leading holiday park character experience — is not a marketing line. It is a genuinely demanding creative standard that shapes every commission. We are proud to be the partner they trust to meet it, across every scale of character build from a five-inch puppet to a full-scale walk-around animatronic rig.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are planning a pre-school character programme for a holiday park, visitor attraction, nursery, children's entertainment company or broadcaster — whether building from scratch or developing existing character assets — we would love to talk.

We have extensive experience building puppet characters specifically for pre-school audiences, with a deep understanding of what very young children need from a character encounter and how to build the mechanisms that deliver it. We also offer ongoing maintenance, replication and development services for existing character portfolios.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters for visitor attractions, pre-school programmes, theatre, television and live events across the UK and internationally, for clients including Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

The Camel Was the Star of the Festival. Here's How We Built It.

Commission: Aldour Events / Remal International Festival, Kuwait | Prince Amir & the Camel | Large-Scale Animatronic Walkabout Character

The Brief

The Remal International Festival is one of Kuwait's most significant annual cultural celebrations — a major public event celebrating A Thousand and One Nights, drawing broad international audiences to the heart of one of the Arabian Gulf's most culturally rich nations.

Aldour Events needed a large-scale walkabout spectacle that would celebrate the camel as Kuwait's national animal — an animal of profound cultural, historical and economic significance to the host nation and its people — while connecting the festival's international audiences to the magic of the Arabian Nights. The character needed to work simultaneously as a cultural tribute and as popular entertainment: accessible and warm and funny for visitors of every background, whilst carrying genuine respect for the culture it was representing.

Prince Amir and the Camel was the response.

The Concept

Prince Amir is a Meerkat of spectacularly inflated self-importance, perched atop a large and magnificently unimpressed camel. He is the storyteller — the connective thread between the festival's international audiences and the world of the Arabian Nights. His take on the ancient tales is distinctive, personal, and delivered with the absolute conviction of someone who believes, without question, that his role in those tales has been both central and criminally underacknowledged.

The camel — Kitty — is the dignity to his indignity. The size to his smallness. The patience to his chaos.

Together they are a walkabout act that operates simultaneously at two registers: large-scale visual spectacle for the crowds, and intimate comedic encounter for the individuals who come close. The camel's scale commands the festival site. Prince Amir's voice — delivered via onboard sound system and microphone — fills it. The combination creates the kind of presence that stops a crowd and holds it, three times daily, for seven weeks.

The Cultural Dimension

The camel is not simply a comic device in this act. It is Kuwait's national animal — an animal whose relationship with the Bedouin people of the Arabian Peninsula shaped an entire civilisation, whose endurance across desert conditions made trade, pilgrimage and communication possible across a landscape that would otherwise have been impassable, and whose image appears on the Kuwaiti coat of arms.

Building a character that honours that significance — that celebrates the camel as a genuine cultural emblem rather than an exotic prop — required a level of cultural engagement that went beyond the technical brief. The design, the character dynamic, the storytelling context, the way Prince Amir talks about the camel and about the Arabian Nights: all of it was developed with the host culture's values and pride in mind.

The client's response — "the camel was the star of the festival" — is the clearest possible confirmation that the balance was right.

The Build

The camel was built to perform three times daily for seven weeks in Kuwait's Gulf climate — a standard that shapes every engineering decision from the first sketch. Multi-directional head, moving mouth, onboard sound system with microphone: the same specification as the Jin characters built for the same festival, applied here to a character of completely different scale, aesthetic and performance register.

Where the Jin were slow, silent and mythologically weighty, Prince Amir and the Camel were fast, vocal and comedically alive. The engineering had to serve that difference: a rig built for sustained dynamic performance, for the quick reactions and broad physical comedy of a walkabout act, rather than the slow processional movement of the Nomadica giants.

Both sets of characters performed without malfunction across the full seven-week residency. In the Gulf heat. Three times daily.

The Specifications

Large-scale animatronic walkabout character. Multi-directional head. Moving mouth. Onboard sound system with microphone. Built for daily performance in Gulf climate conditions over seven weeks.

Build time: Seven weeks.

The Result

"The camel was the star of the festival!"

- Yousef Aldour, Aldour Events

Five words. From a client who also commissioned and deployed the Jin — two giant smoke-breathing animatronic characters of extraordinary complexity and scale. The camel was the star. That is the sentence we are most proud of.

Prince Amir & the Camel as a Bookable Act

The character that starred at the Remal International Festival is also available to book as a walkabout act for your event. Prince Amir and Kitty the Camel perform at festivals, corporate events, Arabian Nights occasions, shopping centre activations and beyond — bringing the same large-scale spectacle and intimate comedic encounter that captivated Kuwait to events across the UK and internationally.

To book the act, visit the Prince Amir & Kitty the Camel performance page.

To commission a bespoke large-scale animatronic walkabout character of your own, read on.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are planning a large-scale cultural event, international festival or brand activation that requires a bespoke animatronic walkabout character — one built to carry cultural significance as well as entertainment value, and to perform reliably in demanding conditions over an extended run — we would love to talk.

We have extensive experience building large-scale walkabout characters for international cultural events, with a deep understanding of how to balance spectacle and intimacy, cultural respect and popular entertainment, artistic ambition and operational reliability.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke animatronic characters and full-service performance residencies across the UK and internationally, for clients including Aldour Events / Remal International Festival Kuwait, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, and Lakeside Arts Nottingham.

Woodland Theatre. Guest Interaction. Two Generations of Squirrel Bear. Four Weeks.

Commission: Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park | The Squirrel Bears | Hand Puppet Characters for Theatre & Guest Interaction

The Brief

Robin Hill Country Park — one of the Isle of Wight's most beloved family visitor attractions, and a long-term Creature Encounter client through Vectis Ventures — wanted puppet versions of their Squirrel Bear characters: the park's own beloved animal hybrids, designed to perform within their Woodland Theatre and to roam the park for guest interactions.

The brief had a particular and charming complexity: the Squirrel Bears needed to exist in two forms simultaneously. An adult version — fully mechanised, capable of the expressive range required for theatrical performance — and a child version, simpler and more robust, built for the kind of enthusiastic handling that young visitors at a theme park will inevitably deliver.

Two characters. Two versions. Four weeks.

The Build

The adult Squirrel Bear is a fully realised hand puppet with a trigger-operated mouth, eyelid mechanism and wrist articulation — the combination of mechanisms that gives a performer the expressive vocabulary to carry a scene, hold an audience's attention and respond in the moment to whatever a Woodland Theatre performance or a guest interaction encounter throws at them.

The child version strips that back to the essentials: a simple hand puppet, built for the demands of young hands rather than trained ones, robust enough to survive the vigorous affection of a park full of children and light enough to be operated without strain or fatigue. No triggers, no mechanisms — just a character, clean and clear and completely alive in the right hands.

The design challenge was holding the two versions in a coherent visual relationship: the child puppet needed to be recognisably the same character as the adult, reduced to its essence rather than simplified into incoherence. A child holding a Squirrel Bear hand puppet needed to feel that they were holding the same creature their parents had just watched perform in the Woodland Theatre — the same character, at a different scale, in a different register.

That coherence was achieved. It is, in some ways, the most demanding design challenge in the commission — and the one that is least visible in the finished product, which is exactly as it should be.

A Note on Multi-Version Character Builds

The Squirrel Bears commission is a clear example of a brief that many clients do not initially think to ask for but that, once explored, almost always makes creative and operational sense: a single character family delivered across multiple formats for multiple contexts and multiple users.

A fully mechanised puppet for trained performers. A simplified version for young visitors. A walk-around animatronic suit for park roaming. A hand puppet for intimate theatre. These are not competing approaches — they are a coherent character strategy, each format serving its own context while reinforcing the others. A child who holds the simple Squirrel Bear puppet is more invested in the adult puppet's theatrical performance. An audience who has watched the adult puppet perform in the Woodland Theatre is more delighted when they encounter the character again in the park.

We think about character builds in this way — as ecosystems rather than objects — and we are very glad to discuss what a multi-format character strategy might look like for your project.

The Specifications

Adult version: trigger-operated mouth, eyelid mechanism, wrist articulation. Child version: simple hand puppet, robust construction, lightweight. Two characters, two versions each. Built for Woodland Theatre performance and park guest interaction.

Build time: Four weeks.

The Vectis Ventures Partnership

The Squirrel Bears are the fourth Creature Encounters commission for Vectis Ventures — following the POLAR bears and Squirrel Bear walk-around characters at Robin Hill, and Cedric the Dragon and the Dodos at Blackgang Chine. Each commission has deepened the relationship, trust, and shared understanding of what these parks and their audiences need from their characters.

Robin Hill now has a character family built across multiple formats by a single maker who understands the park, the audiences, the performers and the operational context from the inside. That continuity produces better characters. It also produces a smoother, faster, lower-risk commissioning process — because so much of what would otherwise need to be established from scratch already exists in the relationship.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are a visitor attraction, theme park, children's entertainment company or broadcaster looking to build a character — or a character family — across multiple formats for multiple contexts, we would love to talk.

We are experienced in multi-version character builds, from fully mechanised performance puppets to simplified visitor interaction versions, and we think carefully about how the different formats of a character reinforce each other to create a coherent and lasting audience relationship.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke puppet characters for visitor attractions, theme parks, theatre and live events across the UK and internationally, for clients including Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

Convincing to the Audience. Easy for the Actor. No Makeup Artist Required.

Commission: Blue Orange Theatre | Burn | Theatrical Prosthetic Mask — Sculpted, Moulded, Cast

The Brief

Blue Orange Theatre — a Birmingham-based touring theatre company with a long history of producing ambitious, design-led work — needed a burn prosthetic mask for a production. The requirements were precise and, in combination, demanding: it needed to be convincing to an audience under stage lighting, at theatrical distances. It needed to be easy and quick for the actor to apply independently, without a makeup artist present at every performance. And it needed to be robust enough to last the run.

The solution needed to mimic the properties of a high-quality prosthetic — the surface texture, the colour gradation, the sense of skin transformed by heat — without the complexity, cost and daily application time of a traditional prosthetic makeup process.

One to two weeks. Built in Birmingham.

The Craft

The mask was built through the full sculptural fabrication process — sculpted in clay, cast in plaster, reproduced in the final material — the same foundational process used across Creature Encounter's creature and character work, applied here at the intimate scale of a human face.

At this scale, the demands on the sculptor are different from those of a large-scale creature build. A creature mask needs to read across a festival site or a theatre auditorium. A prosthetic burn mask needs to read in close-up — in the moments when an actor is two feet from another actor, when the audience in the front row can see every detail, when the material needs to behave as skin rather than simply resemble it.

The surface texture was developed to carry the visual language of burn injury — the irregular topography, the colour variation between damaged and undamaged skin, the particular quality of healed and healing tissue — in a way that is legible to an audience and respectful of what it represents. This is not decorative work. It is character work, and it required the same seriousness of craft that any character build demands.

The final mask was lightweight, comfortable, and designed for independent actor application — a simple, clean attachment system that an actor can manage alone, in a dressing room, in the time available before a performance. No specialist knowledge required. No makeup artist dependency. The actor applies it. The character appears.

A Note on Prosthetic Alternatives

Traditional prosthetic makeup is one of the most skilled and labour-intensive crafts in performance — and one of the most expensive to run across a production's full performance schedule. For productions where budget, touring logistics or performance frequency make a daily prosthetic makeup process impractical, a well-made prosthetic mask offers a compelling alternative: the visual impact of a prosthetic, at a fraction of the ongoing cost and time.

The Burn mask was built specifically to serve this need — convincing enough to carry the dramatic weight of the character, practical enough to be managed independently by the performer. It is a solution that exists in the space between traditional prosthetic makeup and costume design, and it is a space we are experienced in working within.

If your production has a character with a significant physical transformation — burn, scarring, ageing, creature — and the daily prosthetic makeup route is not viable, we would be very glad to discuss what a mask-based solution might look like.

The Specifications

Sculpted in clay. Cast in plaster. Reproduced in final material. Lightweight. Comfortable. Designed for independent actor application. Built to replicate prosthetic visual quality without prosthetic makeup process.

Build time: One to two weeks.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are a director, production designer or theatre company working on a production that requires a prosthetic effect — burn, scarring, ageing, creature transformation or any significant physical character modification — we would love to talk.

We work across the full spectrum of theatrical mask and prosthetic fabrication, from simple single-piece masks built to a tight production schedule to complex multi-component builds designed for a long run. Every piece starts with the same question: what does the audience need to believe, and what does the actor need to be able to do?

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke masks, prosthetics, puppets and animatronic characters for theatre companies, visitor attractions, live events and broadcast across the UK and internationally, for clients including Blue Orange Theatre, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Animal Madness Ltd, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.

Character Costumes for a Magic Show. Built in Birmingham. Performed in Seoul.

Commission: Seoul, South Korea | Bounce | Bespoke Character Costumes for Live Magic Performance

The Brief

A client in Seoul, South Korea commissioned Creature Encounters to build bespoke character costumes for a live magic show — performance contexts that place their own particular and demanding requirements on the characters and costumes involved.

Magic show characters are not simply decorative. They are part of the illusion architecture — the visual language that frames, supports and in some cases actively enables the magic being performed. A costume that reads as cheap or as constructed breaks the spell before the magician has made a single move. A costume that reads as genuinely, completely real makes the impossible seem possible before a word has been said.

The brief was to build characters that served the magic. Every design decision followed from that.

The Demands of Magic Performance

Performing within a live magic show places specific physical demands on character costumes that differ significantly from theatre, walkabout or visitor attraction contexts. Precision of movement matters at a level that a festival walkabout does not require — the difference between a reveal that lands and one that doesn't can be a matter of centimetres and milliseconds, and a costume that impedes or delays a performer's movement by even a small margin can compromise an entire sequence.

Visibility and concealment operate differently in a magic context. A costume element that reads as solid to an audience may need to open, flex or collapse on cue. A character that appears substantial may need to move in ways that a truly substantial costume cannot. The relationship between what the audience perceives and what the performer can do is the central design challenge — and in a magic show, that challenge is more acute than in almost any other performance context.

We built for the performance. The costumes served it.

Building for Seoul

This commission is one of several international builds Creature Encounter has delivered — alongside characters built for Kuwait, Indonesia, Estonia, Singapore, Monaco, Russia and South Korea. Each international commission brings its own logistical, cultural and creative dimensions, and each one has sharpened our understanding of how to manage the design development process remotely, ship finished characters safely across the world, and support clients in contexts where we cannot be physically present during performance.

The Bounce costumes were built in Birmingham, documented for independent maintenance, and delivered to Seoul performance-ready. The distance between workshop and stage was approximately 9,000 kilometres. The characters arrived. The show went on.

The Specifications

Bespoke character costumes. Built for live magic show performance. Precision movement requirements. Built for international shipping and independent performer use.

Build time: Five weeks

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are a magician, illusionist, magic show producer or live entertainment director looking for bespoke character costumes built specifically for the demands of magic performance — or for any live performance context where the relationship between costume, concealment and movement is critical — we would love to talk.

We understand that a costume in a magic context is not decoration. It is engineering in service of illusion. We build accordingly.

We also work with international clients across time zones and are experienced in delivering finished characters anywhere in the world, performance-ready and documented for independent use.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke character costumes, puppets and animatronic characters for live performance, magic shows, visitor attractions, theatre and events across the UK and internationally, for clients in Seoul, Kuwait, Indonesia, Estonia, Singapore, Monaco, Russia and beyond.

Two Dinosaurs That Walk. Two That Are Worn. One Internal Marionette Rig Nobody Expected.

Commission: Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine | Restricted Area 5 | Bipedal Walker & Wearable Baby Dinosaur Characters

The Brief

Blackgang Chine — the oldest theme park in the United Kingdom, and one of Creature Encounter's most valued long-term clients through Vectis Ventures — was building Restricted Area 5: an interactive prehistoric dinosaur experience requiring four characters capable of carrying the full dramatic and physical weight of a live dinosaur encounter.

The brief called for two distinct formats simultaneously. Two full-scale bipedal walking characters — dinosaurs that move through space the way a dinosaur should move, on two legs, with the kinetic credibility that an audience will either believe completely or not at all. And two wearable baby dinosaur characters — smaller, more intimate, designed for the keeper performers who would carry them through guest interactions across the park.

Four characters. Two completely different engineering challenges. One six-week build.

The Walkers

The bipedal walking dinosaur is one of the most demanding briefs in large-scale puppet fabrication. The challenge is not simply scale — it is kinetic logic. A quadruped puppet can distribute its weight across four points and move with relative mechanical stability. A biped has two points of contact, a high centre of gravity, and a movement vocabulary that is instantly, viscerally legible to an audience: either it moves like a dinosaur, or it moves like a person in a suit. There is no middle ground.

The solution was an internal marionette rig housed within the chest cavity of each walker — a mechanism that animates the character's upper body and head from within, driven by the performer's own movement, creating the kinetic chain from foot to head that gives a bipedal character its sense of living, breathing, purposeful locomotion.

This is not a common solution. It requires a precise understanding of how the performer's movement translates through the rig into the character's visible behaviour, and a mechanical design that amplifies and refines that translation rather than simply transmitting it. The result is a dinosaur that does not just walk — it moves with the particular quality of something alive, something ancient, something that has been here before and intends to be here again.

The Babies

The wearable baby dinosaurs are a completely different engineering challenge — and in some ways a more delicate one. Where the walkers needed to command space and dominate it, the babies needed to be held, carried and brought close. The audience relationship is fundamentally different: not the wide-eyed distance of a crowd watching a predator move, but the intimate, breath-held closeness of a child reaching out to touch something small and alive and apparently real.

Each baby features a moving mouth, blinking eyes and flapping wings — mechanisms that deliver the expressive vocabulary of a living creature at a scale and weight that a performer can carry comfortably through a full working day of guest interactions. False arm jackets for the keeper performers extend the illusion: the performer's real arms disappear, replaced by the character's own limbs, so that what the audience sees is not a person holding a puppet but a keeper cradling a creature.

The babies chirp, roar, snuffle and snort — onboard sound systems giving each character its own vocal presence and allowing the keeper performers to create dynamic, responsive interactions that no silent puppet can sustain.

The Skin

All four characters feature latex skins — sculpted, textured surfaces that carry the visual language of prehistoric life across every scale of audience encounter, from the distant silhouette of a walker moving across the park to the close-up inspection of a baby being held at arm's length by a five-year-old who wants to know if it bites.

The texture of a dinosaur skin is, of course, an educated guess — palaeontology can tell us the structure but not the surface. The creative choices made in the skin fabrication are therefore simultaneously scientific and artistic: rooted in what the fossil record suggests, extended by imagination, and calibrated by the single most important question in any character build: what will an audience believe?

The Specifications

Walkers: moving mouths, blinking eyes, bipedal walking, internal marionette rig, onboard sound system, latex skin. Babies: moving mouths, blinking eyes, flapping wings, wearable with false arm jackets, onboard sound system, latex skin. Four characters total — two walkers, two babies.

Build time: Six weeks.

The Result

"Our dino babies have been getting a fantastic reaction across the park. They complement our existing characters well and the performers have loved getting to work with them."

- Verity Godwin, Vectis Ventures

The performers loved getting to work with them. That sentence matters as much as the audience reaction — because a character that performers love is a character that gets performed well, day after day, across a full season. That is not an accident of design. It is the result of building with the performer's experience in mind from the very first sketch.

The Vectis Ventures Partnership

Restricted Area 5 is the fifth Creature Encounters commission for Vectis Ventures — following the POLAR bears and Squirrel Bears at Robin Hill Country Park, and Cedric the Dragon and the Dodos at Blackgang Chine. Each commission has built on the last, the relationship deeper and the creative ambition higher with every project.

Blackgang Chine now has a character portfolio built across multiple formats, multiple genres and multiple audience relationships — prehistoric walkers and baby dinosaurs, a fire-breathing dragon ambassador, beloved park icon Dodos — all created by a single maker who knows the park, the audiences, the performers and the operational environment from the inside. That coherence shows. It shows in the characters, in the performances, and in the audiences who return because the world they find at Blackgang Chine is a world that has been built with care and held together with craft.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are planning a live dinosaur experience, prehistoric themed attraction, immersive science event or any live entertainment programme requiring bipedal walking characters, wearable creature characters or a combination of both — we would love to talk.

We have extensive experience building characters across multiple formats for a single immersive experience — matching the engineering solution to the performance context, the audience relationship and the operational demands of the environment. We understand that a bipedal walker and a wearable baby are not just two different sizes of the same brief — they are two completely different encounters, and they need to be built accordingly.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke animatronic characters, bipedal walkers, wearable creatures and puppet characters for visitor attractions, theme parks, theatre and live events across the UK and internationally, for clients including Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.